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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Obama Doctrine

Glenn Greenwald, reacting to the Haditha war crimes final verdict, posted four points, which resonate, of course, with his latest book and its profound message. His points might be regarded as the centerpiece of "The Obama Doctrine":

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

A president who lied himself into office by claiming he would protect whistleblowers, is now prosecuting more of them than any of his predecessors.

A president who lied himself into office by claiming he would end torture and prosecute those who had engaged in it earlier, is now just snuffing people that get in the way:

The promise to scrap his predecessor’s hardliner war-on-terror policies, which helped Barack Obama win presidential election, is apparently off the table. The political reality is that the current administration is doing quite the opposite thing.

Long before he became US president or the winner of a Noble Peace Prize, Barack Obama was a constitutional law professor. During his election campaign he vowed to reverse the abuses and policies of his predecessor George W. Bush.

Three years later, many civil rights advocates, who once cheered “yes, we can,” are finding themselves disillusioned.

“Not only has the Obama administration blocked torture accountability and refused to investigate and prosecute. He has basically maintained indefinite detention. He has revived military commissions. As well he has expanded targeted killings – they’ve increased under the Obama administration manifold, and he’s even authorized the killing of a US citizen,” explains Maria LaHood from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

“There is a shift between Bush’s policies and the Obama’s on this. Bush’s policy was to kidnap people, take them to Guantanamo or Bagram or some other torture chamber and try to extract some information from them. Obama’s policy is just to kill them. They’re killing them all over the world.

And the Bin Laden assassination was a case point,” he told RT.

Another was the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric. President Obama described the man as “the leader of external operations for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
Apart from those two are hundreds more killed by US UAVs. The number of drone strikes during the first two years under Obama exceeded the total carried out during Bush’s 10 years.

“If a President McCain were doing the exact same thing that President Obama is doing, he would have been denounced by a lot of liberals. It’s one of those dangerous moments in the US history. We saw it a bit with Clinton in the 1990s, where a democrat campaigned and pledged to change the country and the world has actually pushed the right-wing agenda further forward than a republican could have if they took the power,” says New York-based journalist and author Jeremy Scahill.

As Obama gears up for his re-election campaign, civil liberties groups that believed his words the first time around are now left to judge the commander-in-chief on his actions.

"As Obama gears up for his election campaign," I asked some of my friends this morning what they think the Democrats who still support this fucking war criminal should put up as his campaign slogan. Here are some of the suggestions:

‘The devil made me do it’

VOTE FOR JILL STEIN

Obama 2012: “I Suck Slightly Less”

Frack Baby Frack

Of the Banksters, By the Banksters, For the Banksters

This Time is Different

Gotcha!

Half a Loaf of Bread Is Better Than None

“Half a slice is better than none

You won’t be sorry this time!

The Rule of Law is so last century!

He Put the Extra in Extra-Judicial

Believe in change you can be deceived by!

Obama/Citigroup 2012

Who else you gonna vote for?

Eat your peas and get over it!

It could be worse

Read my lips – I am a Democrat

Since 2009 Giving the Tea Party only 95% of what they demand – we know compromise

Obama – He Killed Osama

As you might glean, it will be a tough haul for the Obama campaign machine to get people like me who donated every penny we could afford, opened up our houses to volunteers, and campaigned on the streets and in the Obama HQ for hours and hours to do that again.

Do you think you have a slogan that will help him convince me he deserves the same efforts I gave in 2008?

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Not going to try to convince you...still trying to stop feeling the fool for walking the Parks Highway in thecold with an Obama sign and having brave motorists"fingering". What's a person to do this year? I've thrown away my vote on a long list of alternative candidates inthe past. M Robme? NO!

So, Phil, who do you support for President? Who do you feel will fight for the middle class? Who will promote health care? Who will deal with our foreign nemeses with diplomacy and international cooperation first? Who will better protect consumers against banks and corporations?

For all your rants and insults to the President, I haven't heard you acknowledged the political realities of the office.

And I thought Clinton was the best Republican president until Obama came along. I'm with Phil, support none of the above. In case you haven't noticed, the system is run by the rich, for the rich. Unless you are in that group or hope to be in that group someday, forget about politics in Corporate Emerica.